HEADNOTE: Sorry; this is a long post. For the gist of what I said,
look for the stuff in bold.
It had gotten to the point that I was beginning to think that my player was invincible. Not only had I used it extensively as my personal jukebox, but I had also it used it extensively as a class lecture recorder, I took it with me on airplanes, I dropped it probably 10 times from 4', and I had also operated on it half a dozen times. No doubt, the H300 architecture can take a licking, it appeared to have the right stuff to keep on ticking.
But it was ticking that concerned me yesterday as I tried to transfer a week's worth of lectures to my main computer. Particularly, it was ticking coming from my H320's HDD. A lot of ticking. And in the same rhythm and pattern. I checked the computer to see if it reported anything unusual. Sure enough, it was not long before the "data error - cyclic redundancy check" problem came up.
I had seen the CRC threads before on misticriver, but I had never read them seriously. They probably abused their players, I figured. Besides, my player was invincible. I would
never have something so serious as a CRC error. Or so I told myself. After swallowing my pride, I searched around to catch up on the months of crc error discussion I had missed. It was for my own good -- or at least my player's good. No, wait -- my wallet's good.
I came across numerous threads that were helpful. One thread would have a bit of good advice here. Another would have another alternative. I tried them all and was able to get the essential stuff off the drive and prep it for RMA. But a quick call to iRiver America Tech Support led me to a simple solution that appears to have saved my player from a trip to Milpitas. My goal in starting this thread is to give others a head start in the event that they would need to know what I have spent the past day researching. The following assumes you have a Windows XP system and don't feel strange poking around with the command prompt (read: start -> run -> cmd.exe -> ok button).
1. If you're using your player as a backup drive, or if you are like me and use your player as a recorder, you're probably going to have files that you will want to get off of there. After using the windows explorer to move the unaffected files to a safe place, and after finishing using the player as a backup HDD or whatever, get to your command prompt and type:
CHKDSK e: /r
the /r is like the /f switch, which fixes errors on the disk. /r performs the /f operation but goes one step further, though, and roots out bad sectors on the disk and does what it can with the file system to recover readable information. What it can't recover, it patches so that you can go back to the windows explorer and extract the rest of the files from your player.
2. With the files extracted, you'll probably want to
do some sort of sophisticated scandisk check. Such a check may reveal whether the player's drive just has bad sectors or whether the drive has graver problems. For this, you might want to consider using tools from Norton, O&O Defrag (for surface evaluation) or SpinRite.*
3. If you're dealing with bad sectors, try this:
a. Do a format of the drive through the firmware. Hold Navi -> Click on General -> Click on Format -> Click Navi twice. This will erase what's on your drive.
b. Do a quick format of the drive through Windows XP. My Computer -> right click H300 -> format -> click box for "quick format" -> MAKE SURE THAT THE FILE SYSTEM IS SET TO "FAT32" -> click "Format." It should only take a mintue. This, too, will erase what's on your drive.
Doing this should not only erase what's on your drive but it also seems to completely rewrite the FAT. I wish I knew more about how this works, but it seems to wipe clean the whole FAT and refresh it with a new one. To some, this might make perfect sense. To others, it suffices to say that the drive seems to forget that it had bad sectors in the first place -- either that or the sectors that were bad forget that they were bad.
c. For good measure, you might want to
do a full format of the drive instead. To do this, follow 3b but ensure that the "quick format" box is not checked. This will probably take 10 minutes or so, depending on the speed of your computer and the USB connection.
The format(s) is/are what fixed my bad sectors. Follow up surface scans revealed that the bad sectors no longer existed, or if they did exist, they had been repaired. I don't know how, but I wish I did. I'm probably oversimplifying, but hopefully not by much.
4. To make sure that the bad sectors have not just forgotten the fact that they're bad, consider exercising the drive's read/write capabilities. To do this, I wrote a batch program** that
filled the player's drive with 9,783*** copies of a 1,954 KB (2,000,000 bytes) text file.**** I then wrote a program that
copied those text files from the player back to the hard drive.***** if it made it through both operations without a hangup, I was satisfied that my drive was probably ok.
So, why have I posted this? Mainly, to help others who might be experiencing data/CRC errors avoid the pain of RMAing their players. iRiver is out of h320s and it's only a matter of time before they're out of h340s. If you are experiencing CRC errors on your h300 player, your RMA might net you an h10. And it seems like that would suck. Rather than write off your player's HDD and start shopping for a replacement, or worse, write off your iRiver and start shopping for an iPod, try these steps to see if the problem is as bad as you think.******
--------------------BEGIN FOOTNOTES-------------------------
* A note about SpinRite: using it reminded me of the MS ScanDisk from way-back-when. You can navigate its tools using full screen ANSI menus, and it will give you an ASCII surface map displaying the drive's details. And just like the scandisk of yore, it is SLOW. AS. MOLASSES. Completing just the first level of scanning alone on my h320 would have taken at least 35 hours. If one were concerned about recovering as much data as possible and if the windows chkdsk solution wouldn't cut to muster, SpinRite would probably be helpful. For me, though, keeping my file as perfect as it could be wasn't worth the time it would take (over 144 hours for a level 5 repair). To SpinRite's credit, though, it was useful primarily for its graphical display of the drive, just so I could see
where the bad sectors were. Also, it allowed me to determine the start points and stop points of its scan, so I was able to focus on the trouble spot. To illustrate, my drive's bad sector was about 40% of the drive from sector 0. SpinRite could be programmed to ignore 0% - 39% and 41% - 100%, vastly cutting down on the time it would take to do a scan. And from what I understand, it packs a seriously powerful set of data recovery tools. I would have liked to test them, but I performed the chkdsk operation first. After doing that, there was no point in recovering more data.
** The syntax of the write batch program is as follows:
@echo off
c:
cd\docume~1\default\ desktop\fillh320
set A=1
:alpha
set B=%A%
for /f "tokens=*" %%q in ('dir *.txt /b') do ren "%%q" "%A%.txt"
copy /-y *.txt "e:\"
set /a A=%B%+1
if %a%==9783 goto end
goto alpha
:end
You might want to change the drive letters or directories as needed.
*** Why 9,783? Because 9,784 would result in the drive being completely filled, giving me a 0000 files/0000 folders problem and preventing me from reconnecting to the PC for the read program. I was banking on the suspicion that my bad sectors were somewhere at the 40% mark of the drive and that if I used DOS, I wouldn't have too many problems with fragmentation. I suppose if you look at the problem strictly, I didn't eliminate the possibility that there were bad sectors anywhere on the drive. I came to a 99.99% good-enough-for-government-work certainty, though.
**** the 2,000,000 byte file was created in notepad. It was just a string of 1s saved into a text file.
***** the syntax of the read batch file is as follows:
@echo off
c:
cd\docume~1\default\ desktop\fillh320
set A=1
:alpha
set B=%A%
move e:\%A%.txt c:\docume~1\desktop\ desktop\fillh320
del %A%.txt
set /a A=%B%+1
if %a%==9783 goto end
goto alpha
:end
The thing I like about this program is that it will delete the text file from your computer's drive after it has been read off the player. This way, you won't find your computer overloaded with 20 or 40 GB of text files. Again, you might want to change the drive letters or directories as needed.
****** I just wanted to wrap up this post with another pointless footnote. Thanks for your indulgence.
There is a copy of this post in a thread that will allow for discussion here
Potential Solutions to the Cyclic Redundancy Check Error Problem